White House to insurance companies: STFU

Well, if you give massive amounts of power to people with a history of thug behavior, you can’t be surprised if they turn around and use it. Maybe the industry executives who were initially supportive of ObamaCare, because they saw glittering piles of taxpayer loot and loved the idea of their product becoming a federally-mandated purchase for everyone with a pulse, should have thought that all the way through back in 2008 and 2009. Obama’s governing philosophy requires a great deal of obedience from a private sector he keeps nominally separate from the government. There are many tools for compelling obedience. If the White House PR flacks can’t get the job done, there’s always the IRS.

The White House is especially keen to keep insurance companies from talking about “clarifications made to the Affordable Care Act after the law was passed,” which are “forcing the insurance industry to drop insurance plans that do not meet ObamaCare requirements.”

That was the topic of the blockbuster NBC News report that got blockbustered right the hell off the Internet on Monday night, reappearing hours later with the least Obama-friendly paragraphs mysteriously removed, before an outcry from media watchdogs caused them to reappear. It looks like another round of “glitches” over at NBC’s website have been purging comments posted by readers to this piece, while that fine news organization has become curiously reluctant to talk about its own reporting. Lisa Myers, the lead reporter on the story, didn’t even mention her most explosive findings – there is documentation that proves Obama knew he was lying when he repeatedly promised “if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it,” and regulations promulgated by Health and Human Services are deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of insurance policies – when she appeared on television to discuss it. […]

Of course insurance companies don’t want to be painted as heartless villains – veritable traitors against the American people – for following laws ignorantly signed by corrupt Democrats who didn’t bother to read them, and regulations deliberately written by the Obama Administration. And of course this increasingly desperate White House wants to keep its Little Partners silent while they take the fall for Obama’s failure. Snitches get stitches if they squeal about ObamaCare glitches.

Those of us who saw this fraud for what it was have been saying all along that if the mainstream media had only done its job, we would not now be dealing with this catastrophe. Nowhere is the MSM’s dereliction of duty more evident than in its failure to call Obama out on his lies about Obamacare. John Hayward again:

Over the last few days, there has been some grim amusement over one particular artifact of election-year pro-Obama media bias: the astounding PolitiFact “fact checks” that rated Obama’s ridiculous lie about keeping your health plan “half true.” As the Weekly Standardrecalls, they did it twice, in 2009 and 2012. The very text of these “fact checks” makes it clear, to anyone capable of reasoning beyond the third-grade level, that the correct rating would be “false.” You can only pretend it’s half-true by ignoring Obama’s emphatic, absolute promises that no one would have their insurance plan taken away – he occasionally emphasized this by adding “period!” to the promise – and writing off the people who lose their insurance as an irrelevant statistical anomaly.

But they’re not. The number of people losing their plans in the individual market is enormous, and it’s not difficult to understand why. ObamaCare’s mandates dramatically raise the cost of coverage. Insurance companies cannot continue issuing millions of policies at no profit, or even an outright loss. Some plans are dying and rising from the grave with double or triple the premiums and deductibles. Tales of four hundred percent increases have been heard. A 56-year-old woman in Florida reported a one thousand percent premium increase the other day. You’re not really “keeping your plan” if the company re-issues it with ObamaCare mandates packed in, and it suddenly costs $600 a month instead of $60.

The same PolitiFact “fact checkers” hit Mitt Romney with a flat “false” rating for predicting that under ObamaCare, “up to 20 million Americans, they will lose the insurance they currently have, the insurance that they like and they want to keep.” This is one of the many things Romney was right about. Current long-term projections put the number at 16 to 17 million, which would leave him a bit high, but in the right ballpark. Those projections might prove low once ObamaCare works its magic on the employer insurance market, however, because the damage to the individual market is already greater than some critics anticipated.

The media is awakening to this reality, almost in unison. It’s amazing to watch it happen. They resisted doing any serious reporting or narrative construction until the last possible moment, but the loss of coverage under ObamaCare, coupled with the feeble pace of enrollment, has created a black hole that would devour the last shreds of their credibility if they ignored it.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, who tells lies for a living, answered a question from a reporter about the huge number of Americans losing their insurance by saying (with a straight face!), “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage.”

No, Mr. Carney, that is not what he said. Not at all. Not even close. How many times must we replay the videos and recite the transcripts before these people stop lying? And we all know how important this particular lie was. If Obama had told the truth and informed Americans that his Glorious Five-Year Plan to rebuild the insurance industry would require millions of them to lose the insurance policies, but their sacrifices would be a small price to pay for the marvelous results, he never would have gotten elected.

If he had declared, “I’ll require millions of you to abandon low-cost policies you foolishly decided were good enough for you and your family, replacing them with plans I have deemed superior, at much higher cost… but don’t worry, I’ll require taxpayers to pick up part of the tab!” he’d have been a laughingstock. Among other problems, the voters wouldn’t know exactly who Obama planned to sacrifice on the altar of his ambitions, so the public reaction to blunt honesty would have been driven by widespread apprehension. And remember, Obama and his team of congressional Democrat con artists rammed the Affordable Care Act through by pretending it would reduce the deficit, as well as insurance premiums across the board, not jack up everyone’s premiums and then raid the Treasury to keep insurance companies in business. [read the rest here]

Naturally, everyone expects Jay Carney to come out every day and tell whoppers on behalf of his boss, the Pinocchio of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s what he’s paid to do. The media has no such excuse. Their pathetic performance in this matter was due entirely to their own ideological biases and predilections. They refused to vet Obama when he ran for president, they completely ignored his gaffes (which were legion), they pretended to believe his lies (which were many), they openly rooted for him and against his opponents, and most insulting of all, they repeatedly insinuated that anyone who opposed Barack Obama’s candidacy, or took exception to any of his ideas, or even attempted to be honest about his shortcomings and lack of qualifications for the office, must be a racist, if not a card-carrying member of the KKK. Is it too much to hope for that the Healthcare.gov debacle will shake at least a few Obamaphile journalists out of their self-delusion? Yeah, probably.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013 at 3:55 pm and is filed under gubmint follies, media follies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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